It is hard to tell whether they disapprove or criticise you. Is it me, a white girl choosing to be with a black man, or the fact in itself seeing a mixed race couple is still surprising?

Nobody has ever said anything openly, but one thing is sure that you don’t get those looks from Londoners.

Among foreigners, English people are known for being very indifferent, or tolerant, to other people’s choices in life, be it how you are dressed or whether your partner is from a different ethnic origin.

I’m a white girl from an academic middle-class Russian family and he is a black French man, born in France to Senegalese immigrants.

When I told my mother my boyfriend was black, the first thing she said was: “Will you be able to put up with what the world will think of it? So far, I have been (almost) right, Growing up in the post-perestroika Russia and then Latvia, my environment was everything but multi-ethnic. In a small country like Latvia, the few black people living there quickly became celebrities no matter what they did.